Decider Essentials: ‘90s Soundtracks

With our current ’90s revival reaching new heights each year, it’s time to consider the decade as The Golden Age of Soundtracks. More than almost any other decade, the ’90s offered hundreds of soundtrack albums that featured up-and-coming artists, classic staples (such as the cases of Dazed and Confused, Jackie Brown, and Pulp Fiction), and lovelorn ballads (I’m talking about you, Titanic). While none of those are represented on this list — only compilations with actual ’90s songs, and those that aren’t collections of movie scores, were considered — the ten essential albums here still hold up and offer an eclectic slice of ’90s pop in its various forms.

Juice (1992)

Perhaps the best hip-hop soundtrack of the ’90s was released in the early part of the decade — no other movie soundtrack came close to beating this collection, which featured Naughty by Nature, Salt-n-Pepa, Cypress Hill, and Eric B. & Rakim. (A missed opportunity, though, for the absence of Juice star Tupac Shakur on the album.

The Crow is probably known best as Brandon Lee’s final film — he was accidentally killed on set during filming — but its legacy is probably the stellar soundtrack, a collection of moody alternative rock featuring songs from the Cure (who provided the film’s theme song), Stone Temple Pilots, Nine Inch Nails, and the Jesus and Mary Chain.

The so-so romantic drama spawned a pretty terrific country album, with Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood both offering separate covers of the Bob Dylan classic “To Make You Feel My Love,” as well as excellent tracks from Gillain Welch and Whiskeytown (featuring a pre-solo career Ryan Adams).

Paul Thomas Anderson says he was inspired to write Magnolia after hearing Aimee Mann’s “Deathly,” which contains the line, “Now that I’ve met you / Would you object to / Never seeing each other again” — a variation of which shows up as dialogue in the film. Naturally, he used many of Mann’s songs in the film (along with a couple by Supertramp).